Category: Ubuntu

Added: 30th of October 2020

Viewed: 670 times

Shutdown Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distributions at a specific time or within (x) minutes

I never realised the shutdown command extended further, where you can specify a time to shutdown or shutdown the system in (x) amount of minutes.

To shutdown your system at a specific time, it must be entered the following format HH:MM

So to shutdown your system at Two Twenty PM in the afternoon we enter the following command

To shutdown your system after (x) amount of minutes, it must be entered in the following format +m

So to shutdown the system after 20 Minutes enter the following command


You can also add a message when the shutdown command is initiated, for example shutting down


To reboot your system at Ten PM in the evening we enter the following command


You could create a cron job to reboot your system once a month, once a week, once a day and so on. Cron jobs are discussed in my other tutorial, which can be found here

To cancel a scheduled shutdown or reboot of your system, you can use the following command